


Deus Ex Machina

by Xiaojian



Category: Outlast (Video Games)
Genre: M/M, Nightmares, Possession, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rape, Tentacles, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-02
Updated: 2016-07-02
Packaged: 2018-07-19 13:53:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7363987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xiaojian/pseuds/Xiaojian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All the lines in Miles Upshur's world have blurred. Life and death. Dream and reality. Himself and the sick, disgusting parasite that has decided it owns his body.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Deus Ex Machina

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Deus Ex Machina](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14437110) by [m_izar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/m_izar/pseuds/m_izar)



He didn’t understand the monster that controlled him. But then again, he didn’t understand much these days.

He didn’t understand how he was alive, if he was alive at all. He had felt the bullets pierce his chest, felt his breath stop, but here he was. He didn’t see any lights at the end of any tunnels. All he saw was more and more of this grimy, hellish, monstrous excuse for an asylum.

If anyone had been around to ask him whether he had control over his own body, Miles wouldn’t be able to answer. It felt like he did, and that was the damnedest thing. It didn’t feel like he was being controlled, manipulated. But his totally independent, not-in-any-way-influenced-by-outside-forces thoughts seemed to fall suspiciously in line with what a monstrous god/machine/whateverthefuck would think, these days.

And then there were the dreams. The fucking dreams.

Miles could deal with normal nightmares. Falling, dying, losing his teeth, whatever, he could handle those. And he did have to deal with many a dream replaying the horrors he’d witnessed, experienced, his mind twisting and turning them into horrible “what-if”s. He’d never thought much about firing squads until they started popping up in his mind every other night, with the news he was condemned to die by them being delivered at the beginning of the dream. Sometimes he woke up before he was shot. Most of the time he didn’t.

But, no, it wasn’t those dreams he minded. It was the ones where what was inside of him came out. Slithered out of his pores, his nose, his mouth, taking form into something more _thing_ than _idea_ –

_“Say it with me, class: A noun is always a person, place, or thing.”_

_“What about ideas? Aren’t those nouns?”_

_“An idea counts as a thing, smart guy.”_

– and, sometimes, becoming more _man_ than _thing_.

The Walrider wasn’t supposed to have a sex. It was a nightmarish man-made example of everything you shouldn’t do with science. So how the hell this thing managed to be so overwhelmingly male, Miles would never understand. It went beyond the masculine appearance of the humanoid form it liked to take. The way it moved, its domineering presence, so strong it choked Miles sometimes – it was unmistakably male.

And then there were those dreams. Where it took a form that somehow encompassed all the forms of matter. That vaguely human-male body couldn’t contain all of its presence, nothing could contain it. It leaked out, seeping out as dark, wet mist that rolled over Miles’s skin, bringing goosebumps to its surface, tickling his lungs where he couldn’t help but inhale it. And he couldn’t help inhaling it, when there was something like a hand over his mouth, muffling his screams, then pushing past his lips, prying open his teeth with fingers that quickly abandoned their semblance of humanity, lengthening into writhing tendrils that stuffed themselves down his throat, scraped the walls of his trachea –

Miles bit down, hard.

The Walrider hissed and screeched, the tendrils severed clean where his teeth met. They broke off and fell into his throat, and he thought for a moment he might die, properly die, like this, choking on some fucking tentacles. But they broke apart into cold vapor within his lungs, and Miles coughed, spewing black mist onto the grimy floor.

Why did he have to stay in the asylum in his dreams? Or had he woken up, without noticing, and this was reality? It wouldn’t surprise him, the Walrider moving its torment of him into the waking world, wrapping itself around him, punishing him for his insolence by throwing him clear down the hallway. His left arm and hip took the brunt of the impact when he hit the wall, and he cried out. At least two things inside of him were broken, but he wasn’t even scared. The Walrider wouldn’t kill him. It lived off of him.

But it could hurt him, break him, deal with fixing him later.

It was on him in an instant, taking advantage of the pain that shocked him into a moment of stillness, forcing him face-first onto the floor in a way that tugged at his injured side, making it hard not to scream. In a way that made it easy for the Walrider to subdue him, pry his legs apart, push at him, push _into_ him, his one-handed struggling doing nothing against the parts of the monster that were now completely, painfully solid. Solid and wet and firm and disgusting and completely unnatural.

He’d stopped trying to beg the third or so time it happened to him. The parasite didn’t care about what its host wanted.

At least the thing had the decency to let him black out after what felt like an hour, was probably half of that. When Miles woke up an indeterminable amount of time later, prone on the filthy asylum floor, at first he thought it might have truly been a dream. The only things that challenged that perception were the dulling ache in his left side, and the way the Walrider practically purred at him.

“Good morning, host.”

It didn’t actually _say_ that, of course. Miles knew he was ascribing this “talking” to it – 

_“Your word is: Anthropomorphize.”_

_“Could you use it in a sentence?”_

_“If a writer wants his audience to sympathize with his animal characters, he must anthropomorphize them.”_

– but how could he resist? The alternative was admitting that the Walrider wasn’t just inside him, it had become a part of him, had become him, to the point where its thoughts were now his. Admitting that Miles Upshur really did get shot down hell-knows-how-long ago, and all that was left now was a shambling corpse kept alive by some fucked-up science fair project.

“If you would let yourself enjoy it – ”

“Shut the fuck up.” Miles said, actually _said_ , out loud. Reminded himself that he had that on the Walrider. He was flesh and blood, he breathed, he had a voice that could make words. The Walrider was just –

“Your master.”

Cold mist at the back of Miles’s neck dared him to argue.

For once in his life, he didn’t.


End file.
